Worldbuilding is about making places and people! Whether you worldbuild to write, for an RPG, or just for fun, welcome!
RACISIM! (added to the story only for the sake of showing how horrible it is to have in your soicety) [Trigger Warning: racist words and views may be mentioned in passing]
So... how do you think it's best to add this to a fictional society? What makes fictional racisim beleivable, comparable and present in a society (like the Death Eaters in Harry Potter), not beaten your reader over the head and fumble the message (like Mankind Divided nonsesical 'Aug Lives Matter') or feel like it was accidently let in when nobody was looking (like how occassionaly it feels like race determines character in Tolkien books (even though it's so far off from the rest of the messages of his stories, Narrative Dissonance doesn't even begin to cover it). Do you make people with racist beleifs as stupid as their ideaology, make them as scarry as their beleifs, or have it sneak its way into otherwise sypathetic characters? Let's just focus on the general mechanics of the phenomenon instead of the thing itself... but regardless... [Trigger Warning: racist words and views may be mentioned in passing]




Trust the Law of Conservation of Detail: if it doesn't add to the story, don't include it. Unless you plan to tackle racism and approach it as if it were a theme, there's no use in including it in your story/world. Having racism present in the backdrop of your world isn't a good idea unless it plays a central role in the story because it trivializes actual racism, no matter how well you think you've framed it.
That said, if you decide that it's important to the development of your character or plot then the only reasonable approach would be to draw parallels between your fictional peoples and those in history. Are the marginalized folk being oppressed because of colonialism (this is our land now), imperialism (we made your land better), paternalism (we made your people better), or something else entirely? If you've never experienced racism yourself, the only way you can understand it is by learning from those that have.
the racisim does play off the main character's ideals of 'those don't actually matter' philosophy and a lot of other things... so it is necessary. Also the racisim comes out of a combination of those things, though primarily though Nationalism and mythologzing.
I don't understand what you mean by "the main character's ideals of 'those don't actually matter' philosophy and a lot of other things" or "the racisim comes out of a combination of those things, though primarily though Nationalism and mythologzing".
Sorry. what i meant is that the bad guys beleive that race, national identity and preferences are the biggest determinator of someone's worth to society (ie they are germans and they think germans are the best, so therefore they should rule the world) which leads to them want to practice colonialism, imperalism and paternalism on the rest of the world (ie) world domination.
In contrast, the main character's philosophy is those things are not the core of their being, and instead values the personality of people (ie they're amicable, stubborn, logical or other personality traits)
Hopefully that's easier to process
Fair enough.
If you're talking about fantasy discrimination (half elves have a hard time with career advancement) then my rule is that it shouldn't replace real-world discrimination or make the real-world discrimination invisible.
For example, that's actually the kind of thing JKR has come under criticism for. Especially when she does things like claim that the wizard/muggle divide and anti-muggle discrimination are so overwhelming that Native American witches and wizards had no interest in helping their non-magical families in the face of genocide. You can't wave racism away with a magic wand either, and I don't like when people claim that the wizarding community was somehow a racism-free society. Like, in Hogwarts, it matters if you're muggle-born, but it has to also matter, in a different and intersecting way, if you're a person of color. I don't buy that wizarding society is free of mundane racism just because they got magical racism. It has to be an addition, not a replacement.
This can also get offensive when you basically appropriate the suffering of some marginalized group and put it on a non-marginalized person. Like say being a vampire is a metaphor for being gay. (This has been pulled...a surprising number of times, with True Blood's "God Hates Fangs" church sign, Being Human US's [edit: definitely the US version. Have seen both, typo'd it before] thinly-veiled expy of the AIDS crisis for vampires, and so on) So...where are the gay vampires? If you're telling that kind of story with a gay vampire, that's one thing, but if it's a completely straight vampire that somehow suffers metaphorical homophobia, then it can quickly become a sort of unfortunate mix of Gay Tragedy Porn in a complete representation void.
The BBC series In the Flesh uses being a zombie (or, Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer) as a metaphor alternately for being gay and for having depression. And the protagonist is gay and depressed. Being a zombie isn't a 1:1 comparison to either of those things, nor should it be, but I feel better about it exploring that territory because it's not erasing the real-world struggles of being gay and depressed. It's not talking about how hard it is for a straight, neurotypical person to deal with that.
With race, a common trap people fall into is, "Really it's all humans vs. elves vs. dwarves, humans don't even see race, they just see each other as all human." And it's kind of insulting? And you can get into kind of weird and unfortunate scenarios like the coincidentally lily-white protagonist experiencing the horrors of racism at the hands of a lot of elves of color. Which just reads as "The real victims of racism...are the white people." Or worse, "I didn't care about racism on PoC or didn't think you'd see them as human enough to care about, so I put it on a white person to make it relevant." Doooon't do this.
At the same time, it's worth keeping in mind in historical or fantasy-historical settings that concepts of race have changed quite a lot over time. The idea of "whiteness" is probably only around 500 years old. Before that, it was mostly based around ethnicity and ethnocentrism. And there's still a lot of ethnic discrimination that's not necessarily race-based in a lot of countries--not everywhere in the world follows an American model of race and racism. It's worth looking at how that plays out in different locations, and thinking about cultural/religious/geographical differences as well as differences in appearance. It's important to not use this to erase racism entirely. If you look visibly different from the majority ethnic group around you, yeah, that's still going to trigger ethnocentrism and xenophobia, even if the society hasn't fully formed the concept of race/racism as we know it.
I do think you have to keep clear in your own mind which discrimination is fantasy and which is real. Like the Death Eaters in Harry Potter sound like white supremacists, but they never actually say anything about real-world race. So writing about that isn't the same as writing about real-world racism.
It's also been brought up a lot of times that many marginalized people would prefer those who don't share their marginalization to have diverse casts, but not try to tell the story of oppression itself. I see why people feel that way, because it's so easy to do it badly when it's not something you have experience with, and it honestly tends to really not come out well. I don't think it's offensive to make the attempt, but I think the results are likely to be offensive if you don't actually have any kind of deep understanding of what you're attempting to write. It's an open wound, and it's risky to go poking at open wounds if you don't know what you're doing. I also think that while no oppressions are equivalent, empathy and understanding can begin at thinking about oppression you have experienced, and the less of that you have to draw on, the more caricatured and fake your portrayal of oppression is likely to feel.
I disagree that racism should be left out if it's "not important to the plot," because well, it's part of the real world. I don't think talking about racism automatically makes it issuefic, because it's just holding a mirror up to the world we already have. It's not like that doesn't come up in real life all the time. But I do think it can be left out as a conscious choice because there's enough of that in the real world, and readers of color deserve the chance to take a break from it in their escapism. So it really depends on what your goals are with the story and what kind of world you're trying to create.
A general protip is that you should not be using "___ Lives Matter" if the first word is not "Black." That inevitably is going to come off as mocking and trivializing the statement that black people do not deserve to be murdered. That's a bad place to start.
You also seem to be asking, if I'm interpreting your post and comments right, "Is it offensive if my main character has some unquestioned racism as a character flaw?" The answer, honestly, is "maybe?" Any character flaw is a risk. Really serious flaws like that can in fact jar people into disliking the character. How is a reader of color supposed to feel if the main character comes across as someone who would hate them in real life? Maybe that can be pulled off sometimes--there are some MCs that would hate all their readers/viewers. (Gregory House, maybe? Villain protagonists?) But that's a pretty serious flaw, and when you take a risk like that, you have to accept that some of your readers will walk. The narrative not siding with the protagonist on it and giving the protagonist the chance to grow might help, but there's still a decent chance some of your readers won't be inclined to give the racist cookies for deciding racism is wrong and meeting the bare minimum standards of a decent person. But others might feel differently. Storytelling is full of risks like that.
Basically. If you don't have the sensitivity and nuance to handle real racism, you probably don't have the sensitivity and nuance to handle a made-up fantasy version of racism either. Readers will be smart enough to figure out if you said something offensive even if you hide it behind "they're space aliens, it's different." If you don't have the sensitivity and nuance to handle writing about racism, there's a good chance you'll make a mess of it if you try it. Like anything in life--if you're not good at it and you try to do it anyway you might make an ass of yourself. Which plenty of authors have done before and survived.
This is a fantastic comment that said everything I was hoping to say and more.
Funnily enough and off topic... I am getting a glitch that makes it impossible to read more than the first three lines of his comment... and yours intentionally rubs salt in the wound in that. Maybe in the morning I will check back on a browser and see if I can read it
Wow, yeah it is...a little more than 3 lines long. If you still can't read it I would be happy to email it to you or whatever, that sounds frustrating!
I was just laughing at the fact you just meandered into the punchline for a joke you didn't know exist.... talk to you tomorrow.
Okay so I read your thing... and what I got out of it is that I can't hide normal racism within fantasy racism which you do have a fair few points. Though I'm not sure if I wandered into the problems you pointed out.
For starters, the bad guys are a hidden nation-state of about five billion new-nazis. I don't pull any punches with them so whenever one of these asshats open their mouth, most respectable people would want to fill that mouth with a blowtorch. They're pretty much what you expect. The weird shit is when racism creeps into the home team.
The good guys are a version of atlantis that survived to the modern day, because it is xenophobic enough that they could justify tunneling under a mountain range in Antarctica. But the thing is, about the same time as the Second World War, they had a civil war the government was going to lose. What made them win was massive impressment of sailors from mostly the battle of the Atlantic (don't ask how... not relevant here) which added a forgiven immigrant population that was given a lot of civil rights by the gracious government... though most people consider this group of mostly American group to be entitled, lazy and backward with their non-pagan relegion
What that leads up to is the main character being a white-skinned descendant of those impressed. While he identifies mostly as an Atlantian, most of the people in this country look down on him and hi culture, which they often appropriate in a blackface-Eskimo fashion. The point was to show that current racial dynamics are based only on based on power dynamics and therefore have no objective purpose.... but after what you say I worry I might have ended up creating a situation that is unintentionally arguing that america's culture is being threatened by multi-culturalism, or that white people's culture are being threatened... two things that I don't agree with.
I'm not sure how clear I was, I'm currently recovering from oral surgery... but based off that, you think I'm going off a bridge here?
In my fantasy story, there are humans, fairies, dwarves and elves all living on an island. At some point in the past they all agreed that they would have their separate territories and meet seasonally to trade specialized goods. It's four people groups living separately in close proximity. They're not banned from interacting. But what's pretty rampant in all four groups is non-aggressive nationalism. There's no movements to eradicate each other, just flat stereotypes and an attitude of them being "other". Elves only think of humans as the people who have music. Humans only think of fairies as magic healers, falsely rumored to be able to fly. Faeries only think of dwarves as underground miners. Everyone is intrigued by elves' mind reading powers. No one talks about other people groups as having families or day to day lives; they are stereotyped to what is unique and what they have to offer. Some individual characters are more prejudiced, some are cruel for unrelated reasons, and some "good guys" are just accidentally insensitive because they've learned about differences through a fantastical lens instead of directly from the people who understand the differences. It sneaks into some characters through simple ignorance and society discouraging them from learning in-depth about people who are different. Others are more aggressive in enforcing the idea that "they're not like you and we need to keep our people pure," not to the point of genocide, but to the point of not helping "others" defend themselves from a tyrannical leader until it the tyrant poses a clear danger to "us". In another story a less agreed-upon segregation (at its establishment in this story it was more a matter of self-determination) or a more aggressive nationalism might make sense, but again it must fit the story and be addressed fairly. People are racist with all sorts of justifications, and there can be a variety in individual characters, but you can pick a national/cultural direction that makes most sense, especially effectively if there's a way to distribute propaganda. In 1984 we see the press as a whole feeding the blind trust that because Big Brother says so, Eurasia is evil, or Eastasia, or whoever the enemy is today. It's very clear what is being published and why people with dissenting views aren't speaking out. I have a bit of a rambling problem... but realistically motivations for racism are diverse, and probably even the racist people shouldn't be caricatured. An army will have signed up to fight for different reasons. Know your major characters well and know what power structures are in place to unite people with different reasons for their beliefs under a common goal. If there's misinformation about outsiders prevalent in the society, don't be afraid of letting a sympathetic character innocently hold a false assumption. They cannot know what they have never been taught. We can admire a character's staunch rejection of hatred and still realize they'll make some mistakes until they know better. And the racist attitudes as a whole could possibly be more compelling and realistic when characterized not as a violent hatred in most people, but in a general self-interest and lack of compassion. They don't mind the other group existing, but if that group has something they want they have no qualms about getting them out of the way.
You have to successfully build othering and make your characters sound reasonable to themselves about it. Not anyone else though.
I've only written one prejudiced character who came from a fiercely independent people that offered no allegiance to any planetary government and deeply resented any intrusion onto their lives by planetary governments. She also grew up around ethnic warfare between two neighboring clans of spacers and had internalized most of their denigration of each other. Her prejudice against non-spacers was subtle, primarily coming up only when she was scorning their advise on things she knew more about as a spacer. As soon as someone decides their group categorically is better than any other group, that's prejudice and/or racism. Give them a reason to feel they are categorically better.
Well my current story has a legit horde of Neo-Nazis and another fictional nation with an undercurrent of racism despite growing diversity (ie what's going on with most nations of the western world)... so I have to make racist characters in bulk.
The problem is that, mostly because of that, I haven't figured out how to make a character that is racist that isn't either hostile, a spy or just not nice.That's mostly because the message is that any ammount of racisim taints a world view so hard they can't be trusted with a thimble (the Nazi horde in particular stands out with this.... consistently pulling manuvers that fly in the face of all reason), but all the bad guys feel a bit... cartoonish because of that, as well as there being no apparent moral gradient. The end result is I feel like I'm fumbling the message a bit Mankind divided style.
That's because
is an unsubtle message that requires subtle development to work as something other than didactic.
This is the important part of my comment. They have to have reasons for being racist and feeling superior. They have to consider real superiorities inherent to themselves rather than coming from opportunity. They have to believe stereotypes and othering messages from their parents/society or have had bad experiences with members of the communities they hate.
They have to be sound reasonable to themselves. That's what makes it not cartoonish and makes the reader able to buy how they got to their beliefs as you take them apart and show why they're wrong.
The only problem is that this is a secret cabal nation of Nazis under anatrtica that has isolated itself from the world for a very long time. They don't actually have any naturally created stereotypes because they haven't had anyone there besides fellow Nazis... making a sort of literal national echo chamber. So of course it sounds reasonable to them bit not so much for anyone else or a reader.
The other nation is a bit better, it being a version of Atlantis that is a post singularity superpower that dug itself into a mountian range of Antartica. It used to be as isolated as the Nazis, but during a civil war they sort of inflated their numbers through impressing allied soldiers they rescued from the battle of Atlantic, sort of forcing racial diversity on the place whether they liked it or not. The racists there do have a few actual arguments, like how Atlantis is a technological power and nobody else is, how they survived for so long in isolation and good old religious justification of being the chosen people. The only problem is they only have a prominent place in a potential sequel idea I have.
As for your first people, that's not a problem. That means there is a national mythology why they'd want to exterminate the people they hate. It's stereotypes turned into archetypes and no ability for refutation. It means they genuinely accept the myth as fact or else individual members fall prey to systemic racism where they don't actually care (because the object of their hatred is not present) but there's no impetus for them to rebel and they don't. Of course, their beliefs are reasonable to themselves. They are operating off a narrative that has no opposition.
What makes it believable is the narrative.
There are oppressed groups that "stole babies", were "always" greedy and avaricious, were viewed as criminals, etc. There is a national narrative as to why they hate people x. Each individual in the nation reacts to that narrative in a world where no one opposes it. Use that.
Doesn't matter. Whether there are ten or millions of them, a good story is about the individual characters within that group. You aren't going to have 1,000 named characters who each only say one line. You're going to have a handful who have really developed personalities and stories and then a few more side characters, and then everyone else. You need to make those people real. If you can make us believe why one person believes that, then we can believe all the rest of them do too. If you can't, we won't buy any of it. But you need to convince us about one person, not an entire nation.
Also everything @nonniemas said about the national mythology is 100% on point.
Well by in bulk, I mean that I have to create a nationalistic and mytholigized national identity that every enemy character that opens their mouth has to play off on. Out of the six that open their mouth... they all do respond quite differently to that 'steryotype' for a lack of a better word playing off their actual character traits.
Have you read Ethan of Athos by Lois McMaster Bujold? It's a very similar situation except with sexism: a group of men made their own futuristic colony using artificial wombs and frozen eggs to reproduce. The main character has grown up in this soeicty, brought up to see women as inherently evil and sinful but as a sort of distant boogie monster. The plot involves him being forced to go into the wider world and meet Actual Real Life Women who he is horrified to realise are just...people. It's not a perfect book but it didn't feel sexist and the protagonist is likeable so is probably a good example of how this sort of story can work.
amarante's comment is really, really good. So, I'll just through a few extra cents in regarding not racism exactly, but other forms of discrimination.
So: I'm disabled, a woman, and queer. I face discrimination for each of those things, but it's...in different forms. Some of it is mainly systemic and hard to tease out. For example, I've never been harassed at work or, to my knowledge, worked for a sexist boss. However, there have been plenty of studies showing subconscious bias against women (and people of color) when reading applications and doing job interviews from employers, even if the employers themselves are poc or female.
Which means that even though nobody has ever really insulted me for being a woman, and I grew up in a very "girl-power" culture as a kid, there are still problems across the board that I face because I'm a woman, even if I never realize I'm facing them. This is, I think, why many young women say "I don't need feminism"--because around here, sexism is rarely overt.
On the other hand, homophobia is right in your face. Many people where I live use homophobic slurs. The right to deny service (like, literally at a pizza place) to LGBT people is so important to them that they're angry at laws forbidding it. People in my town routinely and vocally fight against LGBT marriage, LGBT adoption, and seem to genuinely believe that LGBT people are often pedophiles. In a country that neighbors mine, male/male sex can be punished with a prison sentence.
Hate crimes like vandalism against LGBT advocates are not-uncommon, and while violent hate crimes are rare, they are not unheard of.
Finally, as a disabled person, nobody seems to hate disabled people. Or even dislike them really. They just don't want to make even minimal effort to include them. Asking for, say, subtitles or captions for deaf or hard-of-hearing students, or asking for a subtitled movie night at a theatre for a popular new movie (most recently Fantastic Beasts) is seen (by some) as "asking too much" or "wanting special treatment." Asking for inclusion is not considered equality, but burdensome.
So...I guess the tl;dr version is, figure out how discrimination works in your society, because not all discrimination looks the same. Do some kinds of creatures need physical accommodations to be inclusive? Is racism overt or subtle? Just some ideas.